Recently customer Eli asked the question, “Why do I have to clear the peaks on my instrument?” In fact, with full datalogging now being a dominant feature in most gas monitoring instruments, manually clearing the peak reading registers isn’t as important as it used to be. Nevertheless, why is it still a good practice to clear the peak reading registers of your gas monitor before use and just what is all this PEAK reading stuff about anyhow?
Gas monitoring instruments that have a PEAK Hold or a PEAK Reading function store the highest measured concentrations of combustible and toxic gases and the lowest measured concentration of oxygen. If the design of the monitor follows the best practice, the PEAK reading registers will not be automatically cleared when the monitor is turned off. This is to ensure that the peak reading values can be recovered and reviewed if any type of gas exposure incident occurs while the monitor is in use. It is important on the other hand to clear the PEAK reading registers before each days use because if they are not cleared, you will know what the highest readings were, but you will have no idea when they occurred. They could have occurred yesterday, last week or even last month for all you know.
As I said earlier, the presence of a full datalogger in the instrument makes all this PEAK reading stuff a moot point. Retrieval and analysis of the data from the monitor makes it easy to determine what the peak gas concentrations were and exactly when they occurred. But if your gas monitoring instrument does have a PEAK reading feature, the best practice, even still, would be to ensure that the readings are cleared just prior to each use.
So clear the PEAKs before you go out to work and keep safe!
Dave
